Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Most candidates anonymous for now

One aspect of this fall's elections that perhaps has not received as much play as it should with all the focus on national trends is that most of the actual human bodies running for Governor and Senate across the country are largely unknown within their states so far.

We've polled on 34 non-incumbents running for Senate or Governor since mid-April. 22 of them are unknown to more than 40% of the voters in their states. Only 6 have greater than 70% name recognition and out of those 3 have already served as Governor of their states (Bob Ehrlich, Terry Branstad, Jerry Brown), one is Mayor of the biggest city in the state (John Hickenlooper), one currently represents half the state in Congress (Paul Hodes), and the other, well, he's found ways to increase his name recognition for better or worse (Rand Paul.)

The current standing of a lot of these races is being driven by national trends, for now. But candidates matter and when voters start really paying attention and actually getting to know who these folks are there's a high potential for some of these races to take a different turn. That could end up being good news for Democrats in the long run. Let's face it- it's going to be a brutal year if all these contests end up just going with the tide. But a lot of folks in the party are optimistic that when Ohio really gets to know Lee Fisher and Rob Portman and that when Pennsylvania really gets to know Joe Sestak and Pat Toomey, for a couple of examples, that they're going to end up deciding they like the Democrats better.

If the PA-12 and NY-23 special elections had just been determined by the national winds there'd be Republicans in those seats right now- but Democrats proved to have superior candidates and superior campaigns and ended up pulling off a couple good wins. They have to hope that as voters get to know the candidates better in other races across the country this year that the trend continues.

Here's the 'no opinion' numbers on challengers we've polled across the country:

In contrast to Smoking-Too-Many-Herbie's thesis, the more voters have learned about Toomey and Sestak, the better Sestak has done. While the attention was on Sestak and Specter, Toomey was able to hang back and keep his extreme-right views out of the limelight, sustaining a lead from last October until this May. Now that voters are directly comparing the two, they're all tied up. Even unreliable Rasmussen has swung wildly recently, including at one point an 11 point swing in the span, showing at times Sestak up and at others Toomey. Predicting that the trend will suddenly reverse itself is frankly silly. Using words like 'Islamofascist' makes it all the more clear who today's wild-eyed radicals are - the nuts on the far right, the modern mirror incarnation of the equally-fervent, equally-unrealistic, equally-out-of-touch Hippies of the 60's.